We arrived at Ujiji from our tour of discovery, north of the Tanganika, December 13th; and from this date the Doctor commenced writing his letters to his numerous friends, and to copy into his mammoth Letts’s Diary, from his field books, the valuable information he had acquired during his years of travel south and west of the Tanganika.  I sketched him while sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the veranda, with his Letts’s Diary on his knee; and the likeness on the frontispiece is an admirable portrait of him, because the artist who has assisted me, has with an intuitive eye, seen the defects in my own sketch; and by this I am enabled to restore him to the reader’s view exactly as I saw him—­as he pondered on what he had witnessed during his long marches.

Soon after my arrival at Ujiji, he had rushed to his paper, and indited a letter to James Gordon Bennett, Esq., wherein he recorded his thanks; and after he had finished it, I asked him to add the word “Junior” to it, as it was young Mr. Bennett to whom he was indebted.  I thought the letter admirable, and requested the Doctor not to add another word to it.  The feelings of his heart had found expression in the grateful words he had written; and if I judged Mr. Bennett rightly, I knew he would be satisfied with it.  For it was not the geographical news he cared so much about, as the grand fact of Livingstone’s being alive or dead.

In this latter part of December he was writing letters to his children, to Sir Roderick Murchison, and to Lord Granville.  He had intended to have written to the Earl of Clarendon, but it was my sad task to inform him of the death of that distinguished nobleman.

In the meantime I was preparing the Expedition for its return march to Unyanyembe, apportioning the bales and luggage, the Doctor’s large tin boxes, and my own among my own men; for I had resolved upon permitting the Doctor’s men to march as passengers, because they had so nobly performed their duty to their master.

Sayd bin Majid had left, December 12, for Mirambo’s country, to give the black Bonaparte battle for the murder of his son Soud in the forests of Wilyankuru; and he had taken with him 300 stout fellows, armed with guns, from Ujiji.  The stout-hearted old chief was burning with rage and resentment, and a fine warlike figure he made with his 7-foot gun.  Before we had departed for the Rusizi, I had wished him bon voyage, and expressed a hope that he would rid the Central African world of the tyrant Mirambo.

On the 20th of December the rainy season was ushered in with heavy rain, thunder, lightning, and hail; the thermometer falling to 66 degrees Fahrenheit.  The evening of this day I was attacked with urticaria, or “nettle rash,” for the third time since arriving in Africa, and I suffered a woeful sickness; and it was the forerunner of an attack of remittent fever, which lasted four days.  This is the malignant type, which has proved fatal to so many African travellers